Anand Kumria wrote:
That's really a maintainer decision to make.
Almost all of the core GNOME components are maintained by the GNOME maintainer team, so they will tend to act in a unified manner. What I have described is their current policy, which is generally supported by the release managers.
I have no issue with 'breaking' unstable if required. If you are intelligent enough to be running it, then you'll either have the packages that are critical to you on hold or you can cope with the problem.
I do have issues with breaking unstable - we are supposed to be close to a release, and something like the GNOME desktop we don't want to suddenly break. This holds even for unstable, because even though there exist other mechanisms, it is still by far the preferred method of staging release-candidate software for inclusion into testing. Something more disruptive, like a major version hike in lots of components of GNOME, especially when you can get problems with library versions and dependencies etc, needs more care and planning, hence the staging new GNOME releases in experimental.
And then all the other people who build against various Gnome/gtk libs discover that because of incompatible source code changes, things that previously built with, say, one version of gtk+ requires updates for the new version.
There aren't that many incompatible source code changes that I'm aware of - some widgets may be deprecated but will still exist in the new GTK+ versions. Gaim is buildable still with any version of Gtk+ from 2.0 onwards, and I think 2.6 is the first release where ifdefs have moved from the sense of "make use of improved features where available" to a "the old way of doing this is deprecated".
That kind of problem is something that is well hidden from other developers and really destroys the utility of having 'unstable' in the first place.
People who maintain GTK+/GNOME based packages are exactly the people who should pay attention to the fact that GNOME releases are put into experimental first. That's why this mailing list exists, and it's announced and co-ordinated here.
To me a GNOME release is a "we believe these packages work well together". I don't think it should necessitate them being packaged / uploaded all at once.
We should upload it when upstream calls it stable, and GNOME does that with the components of their desktop all at once. If upstream don't believe they work well together... surely that's a good hint not to put them in the critical path for our release?
Cheers, Anand
Regards, Rob